I work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself. Just because he contributed to the first prototype does not entitle him to claim creation. He wasn’t even the first person inside Microsoft to use LLMs in an IDE completion experience. The work from prototype to product is an order of magnitude more than prototype alone.
Orilly? We had no PM, EM, or designer: I played all those roles for 1.5 years.
I was one of the first to touch the OAI code model. Me and Albert developed the in-the-wild testing harness still in use today. We pulled all nighters to get GitHub approved for participation in the MSFT-OpenAI deal using those test results.
Existing Microsoft AI teams worked to halt our work, pushing their own small, worse models instead of OpenAI's.
I protoyped and lobbied for creation of the VScode extension. I invented and hacked the ghost text prototype into VScode, I invented the block based termination and implemented all the tree-sitter based logic needed to do it. Then I had to lobby up to Satya to get VScode to implement proper support in less than 6 months.
I named it Copilot.
I implemented GH auth, made the waitlist and onboarding. Helped design the e2e http/2 go server, after designing the fast.ly based precursor. Coordinated moving from OpenAI datacenter to Azure to improve Asia experience, and oversaw the cutover.
I was Chief Architect. It was my baby. Sad if this is how they are spinning the story internally at GitHub today.
Seems like people are eager to attack you because you've shown a bit of arrogance, but if what you wrote is true then it's completely fair to feel frustrated about it. I sympathize with you. I used to feel this way about much much smaller achievements of mine.
Even though I don't use it personally, Copilot is a great tool and the bonus is laughable when you put it next to the impact it had on how people write code. For me lesson learned was that in order to spend your career in a good place and to save yourself months or years of time is to voice your concerns early and move on if all you hear are promises without any follow up.
If your title was Chief Architect then accomplishments like this are baseline expectations for an IC, and your comp would have reflected that. It would have been well into 7 figure territory.
I don't think "chief architect" is a title at Microsoft, and it's probably worth noting that unless you're at the partner level, your pay at Microsoft will be pretty terrible compared to the rest of the tech industry.
That said, Alex's title appears to be principal engineer at GitHub, which is roughly equivalent to principal at Amazon in both expectations and comp. I worked at AWS for just shy of six years, and I can tell you that the person who created Firecracker -- which underpins huge portions of AWS's technology -- was at the same level, and while they were promoted shortly thereafter, they didn't receive a bonus (because comp packages at that level don't include bonuses at all). So, yeah, Alex is justified in sharing these details publicly, but this is just how it works in tech. (And, frankly, all the underpinning infrastructure that supported him wasn't his work -- he might have come up with Copilot, but would he have been able to without the work of thousands of others?)
Exactly. He did his job, and was paid handsomely for it (and whether or not it became anything).
He leveraged massive resources to do it and was allowed to tap people with multi-decades of experience (even implicitly - you think he build the execution engine where his "test harness" ran?).
Not to mention that he essentially wrote a wrapper around an API..
If he put his total comp this pity party would shrink to one.
No matter the accomplishment, I doubt they would have been able to create copilot outside Microsoft and thus without Microsoft’s resources (computing infrastructure, engineering talent and software ecosystem).
And the “join a startup” is a dumb piece of advice as you’d be still making some one else profit.
Create your own company, and face the likelihood of bankruptcy.
Driving a brand new product from the ground up is not in the job description for almost all levels. Only maybe if you're one step below Distinguished Engineer.
It is (or was) explicitly in the role guideline at MSFT for principal level. There's lots of variation at that level. Some sit on their butt and only chime in when they have expertise, others prototype new ideas of their own. That's how a few things I know came to be.
No offense but this comment sounds really egotistical and shows a total lack of self-awareness. Software is all about teams and if you have one guy who thinks he's god's gift it ultimately hurts the whole team. I'm not surprised your compensation is much less than you think it should be, I suspect Microsoft has a more accurate view of your value than you do yourself.
I mean sure, technically this is correct. But it also fundamentally takes away from independent contributors and visionaries. Sure, "software is all about teams," but Linus Torvalds is definitely the guy behind Linux, and Palmer Luckey is the guy behind Oculus. It's unfair to take their achievements away because nowadays millions of people people contribute to Linux and Oculus was acquired by Meta.
I don't know OP, but I've seen this play out dozens of times in the cutthroat of corporate day-to-day, so it wouldn't surprise me for Microsoft to have a revisionist interpretation of how Copilot got started.
My own threshold for "I created X" would be "I was solo dev, until it got legs of its own and started needing serious outside help." I don't know the story behind Oculus, but objectively Linux and a host of other famous OS projects do have origin stories like this. Yet for this project -- even by his own telling, it wasn't just him, but "me and Albert". Okay. Not to mention it was all done in a bigcorp environment -- which by definition means tons of support from all kind of people (even while others may be simultaneously blocking or competing against you).
That's why the "I created" self-description rings hollow in my book -- as it does in essentially every other corporate / large-org case I've heard of (whether done as self-promotion, or the puff stories we're told about people we're supposed to hire or have run our teams or otherwise).
And which is why even people like Steve Jobs, who of course "was" the products he was famously associated with -- never went around saying "I created this." Not because he lacked for ego, or because his contributions were not monumental. But because he was smart enough to understand that once things get to a certain scale -- this kind of attribution is both absurd, and entirely beside the point.
> Software is all about teams and if you have one guy who thinks he's god's gift it ultimately hurts the whole team.
I don't see this reading in the comment above. He is just sharing the passion and sense of ownership he put to create a great product. BTW He mentioned that it was a team effort in the thread, so I don't see any problem issue here.
> Software is all about teams and if you have one guy who thinks he's god's gift it ultimately hurts the whole team.
John Carmack would agree with you.
And it's funny because while Carmack was that single person which was pretty much the best dev in the whole company, Romero was a better fit of your description.
Carmack obviously is (and was) a genius developer but I don’t recall him ever saying “Doom was my creation” or “Quake was all me.” Even though he clearly had a huge impact on the success of those games. He’s always been (in my eyes) a pretty humble and easy to work with person (this is seconded by some people I know who worked with him at Meta) which has contributed to his success.
This total lack of empathy is why our industry is a circle wank of dudes. Why do you feel so obliged to defend the most evil company in history? And why do you feel the need to make personal attacks at some dude, is it because you think you are so much better yourself?
It's not about defending Microsoft -- it's about defending and acknowledging the dozens if not hundreds of other people who worked on, and continue to work on, Copilot and making it a commercial success.
A better approach to doing that (for the corporate employer) might be to say 'Here's a million $ bonus for the team, please divide up amongst yourselves as you see fit.'
The short version are all of the "X East India Companies" that were formed in Europe that effected much of the West colonizing Asia. The list of atrocities is immense.
Exxon and Texaco (now Chevron) would also be high on the list.
I want to be clear: I am absolutely not giving Microsoft a pass here. They've done quite a lot of bad. But they're a relatively new kid on the block vis-a-vis other companies out there.
PS. Within tech, I would also say that Oracle might top the list of 'evil companies' - but in their case, they really seem to actively embrace it (not that that's a good thing).
Btw, your message behind this is that you should work at a startup (maybe yours), is that correct? How do you plan to compensate individuals who do this type of work at your own startup?
It depends on how revolutionary the product or service was. Not sure if any company still does this anymore, but the way Google rewarded and recognized the initial teams behind stuff like gmail and Google maps seems more fair. Based on the comments I’ve seen so far, i doubt that OP received much of either from GitHub / MS.
Edit: I’m not saying that MS / GitHub is obligated to do anything more than it already has. From a PR perspective, it’s just far cheaper to give a fatter bonus and promotion to early contributors to a big product and publicize it. It will also encourage other employees to push instead of just cruising. Otherwise, now you have someone making a logical case for not working very hard for either GitHub or MS
Not the op, but looking at MSFT on levels.fyi at least the last level of Principal SDE (e.g. 67) would be the minimum I'd grade Copilot with. 68 or 69 would be more appropriate.
I am specifically referring to the features he lists in his comment above. E.g. ghost text, block completion, and OpenAI integration.
To add to his credit Copilot in VS proper still sucks, so I'd estimate original VS Code hack to have better skills than the whole (e.g. the sum of) VS proper Copilot extension team.
Their profile does say "creator of GitHub Copilot, Dropbox Paper, MobileCoin, and Hackpad" which indicates a bit of an ego problem. Professional software is a team effort, and pretending to be the only person who worked on a project is a red flag. Most people would say lead developer rather than creator...
Well, most interviews I’ve been a part of always emphasize “I wanna hear what YOU did, don’t talk about the team.” It kinda optimizes for embellishing ones contributions, and has almost become expected.
It's also part of the dog-and-pony show of self-promotion most companies make you do in order to justify promotion. Being Engineer 1 on a team of 6 that made GreatProductX is never enough. You always need to show what you single-handedly did. So all of a sudden, six different people claim to have "created GreatProductX".
It just couldn't have happened without the delivery managers, project managers, product managers, scrum masters, project controllers, business analysts...
What a funny world we live in! :)
Getting back to reality, ideas and prototypes are easy. Execution and delivery is hard.
This. What we see is nothing more than what the job market actually reward and incentives. This person is just playing that game to boost his personal brand. You may not like it, but if you don't play this game in the current job market you will have quite hard times.
Thats not what that line of questioning means; they are trying to understand what your actual contributions were, and how well you can both explain and contextualize them. Embellishment is why we have such a heavy emphasis on coding interviews these days, sadly.
Concept that comes from RPG's, or any sufficiently complex optimization problem where you have a limited number of total points to spend so you "min"-imize the least helpful stats and "max"-imize the most helpful. For a fighter character, you'd obviously max out strength, as well as constitution and dexterity. You'd minimize intelligence, charisma, and wisdom - not because they’re not helpful but because you only have a limited number of points to spend. In the context of:
> The trick to effective min-maxing in social contexts is to make sure people can't tell you're min-maxing.
It means that, while in interview situations there is an expectation that you say "I did this", in social situations you might get more benefit from seeming to be more humble and appear to withhold your accomplishments, perhaps doing it in a way where someone else fills the gaps for you, or it entices the other parties into doing a bit of digging on their own and perhaps find some well-placed bios online that look like they weren't written by you / at your behest which do your bragging for you.
This avoids the situation where someone will say: "I work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself." as other people respond "huh. yeah. that makes sense."
While it may have existed for a long time, it's gotten significantly more use in recent days in a non-RPG settings. Quick illustration from HN comment section[1]:
- From 2010 to 2019: 40 occurrences in HN's comments
- Compare that to over 70 for just the past two years.
Basically, it's as if you said “Woke” wasn't a contemporary word, because it used to exist in a niche for a long time.
FWIW, while I don't know the origin of this term, I learned it first as a noun, used in the context of AI - the old-fashioned AI, as applied to game development, some 15 years ago. The verb form, however, is something I've only noticed people using in the last few months; it's possible this is due to some recent events that made the term more widely known / popular.
I see you're on the singular side of the contention amongst grammarians (plural vs singular). I think you're wrong as do a lot of other people. The fact it's been used widely in this context for the past couple hundreds years proves you wrong.
If he built the first prototype, I'd call him a creator of it. It had absolutely nothing to do with who was the first person inside of Microsoft to use LLMs in an IDE completion experience.
I call everyone who builds the first thing the creator(s). This isn't uncommon or weird in my mind at all.
He may be totally fully of himself, but I don't see any realistic argument that he isn't one of the creators.
He's not calling himself "one of the creators" though. He's calling himself the creator, which shits all over the hard work of OpenAI, "Albert" and more.
I work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself.
Thanks for the reality check, and Occam's Razor suggests this is (unfortunately) the most likely explanation for what we're reading.
Sure, employees get taken advantage of, and screwed over by politics all the time. But something about going online and openly (and quit caustically) negging your employer while still on their payroll suggests that there's something seriously off about this guy.
And that in any case, his synopsis of the situation is not to be taken at face value.
Edit: Actually we don't have information about his current status with them. My mistake. Thanks to the commenter below for pointing that out.
Wait he's still employed there? How is this not going to result in a HR call up later on? How can he possibly think this is a good idea? I was under the impression that he already moved on to another company and was just bashing his old employer, which is still a bad idea, but this is just weird.
Maybe, but he is in the comments here defending himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was something where all the heavy lifting was done by a couple people. That’s often the case. If it’s true, really doesn’t make me want to work at a huge company like that.
And you're basing the truthfulness of his statement on what, exactly? That it corroborates with how you want to feel about the original poster? Hardly a "reality check."
Common sense, and a reasonable Bayesian prior for these things. And the fact that (whatever his intrinsnic talents) what the first guy was saying just smells like BS, and he seems backpedal a lot.
In a later tweet, he even mentions there were 6 other people and they built on top of existing work. Doesn't really sound like he's within a mile of solely creating anything, no matter what spin he likes to apply.
Also, the hundreds of GitHub employees who worked on GA. It was a dogfooding project internally before talented engineers in GitHub turned it into a commercially viable product.
What? Prototyping is often the easiest and most fun part of projects. Often a prototype taking 1-2 people a few weeks turns into an entire team fleshing it out full over the next year or more. Thats a lot of risk if it goes wrong. Theres usually very little risk in prototypes going wrong, thats one of the main reasons to have a prototype phase to begin with.
You make one prototype in a few weeks with a couple of people then call it a day and start fleshing everything out???
Dude, it might take a few weeks to work out if a big project is even viable in a large company.
Prototyping a full product is not the easiest part of the big project by a long shot. Prototyping is when you find and create the constraints, reduce the chaos and make the project legible so other people can work on it.
If you do it right, it should make it easier for other people to work on the project not harder.
The older I get, and the more I work on aspects of trying to build businesses, products, and services, the more I lament the loss of a kind of service-oriented ethos that truly makes societies great and that seems to only be "refreshed" (in America, in particular) by the darkest of times*. Here, I think of the people who went through the first half of the 20th century in comparison to the MBAs and similarly naively "optimizing" agents elsewhere in important / controlling positions in current society.
Game theory 'says' that anyone can choose D(efect)-heavy strategies, and in many environments, profit heavily, personally (aka, "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do..."). But, a society with too many such players is not long for this world.
* Much as was said by a certain Founder about the "tree of liberty" - many of the Founders, including even TJ, who could be quite self-interested, understood that liberty requires responsibility and sacrifice ...
How so? If anything it seems the opposite is true. (Prototyping, almost by definition, is almost zero risk. While bringing stuff to market requires real resources, and invokes actual brand and reputation risk. Might be different in some situations, depending on the resources required at respective stages, but that seems to be the long and short of it).
Sure but a lot of things don't happen without that one person pushing for it. If Alex is correct that he's the one who pushed for it to happen and created the momentum for this product feature to exist, despite many others actively pushing against it, that to me deserves a lot of credit.
Now, I have no idea if that's true and to what extent it's true - it's common for ICs to be unaware of the work others have done behind the scenes to convince the right folks and unblock their work (not saying that this is what happened, just that it's not inconsistent with Alex's perception that he drove this himself) - but I'm not sure how anything you're saying disproves his version of the story. You could say that about just about every startup founder.
What was his contribution to the project? Given the information you give us, he may be the creator of copilot. He may not have made the product, but might be his father, the one who did the crucial original work with most added value, even if it's only 5% of the work.
> He wasn’t even the first person inside Microsoft to use LLMs in an IDE completion experience
It is you who is full of oneself, your attempt to belittle his contributions shows the kind of human you are. Stop hiding behind the keyboard and tell that to his face.
My first job out of college was at Google Ads on a team of 7 creating a new Ad format that ended up being pretty successful. That ad type has now made billions of dollars, and I did get a promo and bonuses, but I never expected anything like profit share because it felt so obvious to me that I was standing on the shoulders of thousands of giants.
There was the ads policy team that made sure our ads weren't offensive.
There was the Cider team that gave us an efficient IDE for doing our work.
There were the SREs that made sure we wouldn't break everything when we ran releases.
There were internal tooling teams that made our tests reliable, our builds fast, and our development easy.
There were the creators of the frameworks we used on the frontends/backends/infra.
There was the creator of Memegen that kept me sane.
There were dozens of folks telling me what to do as a new grad that made my job easy.
There was the experiments/AB testing folks who helped us tune our models.
At the end of the day, I was converting protobufs from one format to another, making a UI here or there, parsing some logs, making minor model adjustments, etc. It was work, pretty similar to what I've done at other companies, it was just that the scale was different.
I always wonder when I see stories like this if these folks really were as critical as they claim to be or if they were just in the right place at the right time to get a bunch of visibility. Especially when in that Twitter thread there is this conversation:
> What do you mean by created? Did you code it from scratch yourself?
> Alex: Yes, me and 1-6 others.
> Scientist at OpenAI: hey
> Alex: correction: + much of OpenAI eng, plus years of their bleeding edge research
I wonder if Alex maybe had more help than he's claiming in other places as well.
Why is this getting aggressively downvoted? Ironically, there's literally a 2010 math paper entitled "PageRank: Standing on the shoulders of giants[1]."
Same could be said about most innovations; Turing's machine, for example, relies on the work of other mathematicians/logicians. It is true that knowledge is collectively built while profits are only enjoyed by few but PageRank was unique in its own right.
and what upper/lower bound can you put to the share of value that you would assign to the ability to and effort of gathering "thousands of giants" and orienting them towards some useful direction, rather than being hands on?
I'm sure there's something bad about this, but wow he really needed to read that Tweet out loud before posting it. To anybody without specialized knowledge about what his accomplishment normally would result in (including me), this Tweet looks incredibly out of touch - like a CEO complaining that their bonus was five digits instead of six. Again, I am not saying that this is what's happening - I'm saying it looks like that to probably 99% of people.
As an aside, his wording is very confusing to me. He says "total comp", so he is either saying that he worked for free, or the phrase "total comp" doesn't include your salary, which both sound crazy. And wouldn't a "title bump" come with a salary bump? If it didn't, surely he would say that, right?
So he "only" got a six figure salary, five figure bonus, stock grant, promotion, retirement fund, healthcare and FAANG-level benefits with unlimited company resources to do his work and a large failure cushion. Dude is going to get a massive reality check when he joins a startup and sees the reality of how the other 99% works.
And this ignores the fact that his engineering team had at least a dozen other people and Microsoft paid billions to OpenAI for any of his work to even be possible. What did he expect exactly, founder equity?
> So he "only" got a six figure salary, five figure bonus, stock grant, promotion, retirement fund, healthcare and FAANG-level benefits
My guy. Are you being held hostage by your employer? Blink twice for yes.
I had most of those things with a bachelors straight out of college, working for a dinky startup. A six figure salary is basically minimum wage for software engineers in the Bay.
If you're making less than six figures, your employer is exploiting you. I hope you find a better job.
He lists 'principal' on LinkedIn. According to levels.fyi, that's roughly a ~100k/year TCO increase on-top of the 20k spot bonus assuming that's his new title not old. That's not a tiny bump.
Microsoft is pretty famous among engineers for not paying unless you force their hand, but totally willing to negotiate if you do. Which is pretty much business 101, so I’m not sure why anyone is surprised.
Line up another offer and watch them throw huge bonuses to retain you (if you’re really worth what you think you are). I know from my and others experience they are happy to exceed even pretty crazy external offers if you bring them to the table, they just won’t increase your pay a dime if they don’t have to.
Microsoft also has the advantage of operating in a state with a (relatively) low cost of living when compared to Silicon Valley and no state tax. Engineers there are very happy despite the pay cut.
Not really, the Seattle area cost of living is very high and nearing SF levels. Average home prices are shooting up near $1m in Seattle. Even renting a studio apartment is almost impossible for less than $2k a month, it's ridiculous.
Not exactly. Median Bay area homes are selling for 1.2m vs. 840k in Seattle. Average studio apartment rental in SF is 3k a month vs about 2.2k in Seattle.
They're both extremely high costs of living. You aren't saving that much moving to Seattle. There is a noticeable salary difference/adjustment down if moving from SF to Seattle too.
Sure but it's not as bad as you're implying, and for your calculation take a 20% or more cut to your San Francisco salary to make it comparable to Seattle salaries. It's all roughly the same in the end.
The pay cut is exactly what we are talking about. Microsoft is able to pay inferior salaries because of the lower costs of living. So which part are you disagreeing with?
People in Seattle are no more richer or "happy" (your exact words I was replying to) vs. in SF is my point. Sure a home costs a little less but you're also paid less in Seattle. It's not a dramatic 2x difference in costs (again your words).
Unfortunately I'm not sure there's much of an alternative here. If you want to capture more value you could have gone and done your own startup, but of course you would have needed access to data/code for your machine learning to learn off of, which may not have been possible outside of GitHub.
Can anyone think of some other pathway, other than trying to negotiate for more compensation, after proof of concept is delivered?
There is no other pathway. You are either an entrepreneur or you aren't. You either take risks or you don't. If you opt for the safe paycheck then that paycheck is exactly what you are going to get.
20k sounds good. Also a good reminder to just work in an idgaf mode. Their success is not your success. Work the least you can to avoid being fired, and try to improve yourself whether it aligns with the company goals or not.
20k is not a good bonus for this company. That's the bonus plan for a run of the mill engineer just starting out there. You'll find college grads hired right out of school with a higher bonus plan.
The “normal” (meaning you met expectations but didn’t wildly exceed) bonus at Microsoft for a L65/L66 (Principal) level is 20% of base salary. Officially the range is 0-40% but the vast majority will get 20%. Base salary at this range is about $200-$250K, so a normal bonus would be $40-$50K at that level.
I would assume so. It's Microsoft after all. All big companies have some kind of "bonus" in your salary especially in America. I think 20k is too low to be that. I get more than that and I work in the EU.
Yeah, many of these comments are bizarre. And the fact that you were downvoted is bonkers. I got a $5k bonus in 2004 at a non-FAANG for simply installing a single software program from source (I forget what it was) that wasn't in Debian's package repos at the time.
I realize that HN in 2023 is a far different place than it was in the beginning, but has the percentage of users in rural states and developing nations skyrocketed recently or something?
there might be some psychology about a) low-effort postulation b) mentioning money amount directly, which is directly different for different economies and life circumstances. It is my opinion but it might not be constructive.. for example I am easily offended by "all money all the time" type talkers, and there are many variaties of those.. its not inclusive but its not an inclusive topic either. last, harsh times call out harsh talk.. the economic stories here are so across the board. It does raise the blood pressure simply reading some days $0.02
I can relate somehow, I once did create a lot of software from scratch and idea to the total production, and didn’t even have a raise! So I learned the hard way that no matter what you do, all your efforts will be gone to someone else, your success is theirs and your failure is yours only, so I started my own business!
Innovating at a big company without the control over the rewards (and a contract to back it up) is sort of a lame bargain. You end up with a low downside risk (cash) but your upside opportunity is whatever you've pre-negotiated. Even within sales, if you bring home a huge contract you're more likely to get fired and forced to arbitrate your 'bonus'. The entire system is a joke.
If you really want to do innovation and you don't need the resources of a huge company to do so, and you're risk adverse then... gosh I don't know what to say.
This hasn't been my experience. I spent over a decade at startups, a handful of years at a big research lab, and over a decade at a big company. I've made far far more money from working at the big company than I did at the startups, and one of them had an exit. Unless you are a founder, you will get less in most exits than you do getting bonuses and stock options at a big company once you've climbed the ladder a little bit.
>If you really want to do innovation and you don't need the resources of a huge company to do so
Practically anything at the cutting edge of research is incredibly capital intensive. So you're either loaded to start with or you have to spend most of your time collecting money rather than doing research.
If you're a researcher who cares primarily about their work, the freedom you have by working for a large company or a government institution is immense. Personally I will take a generous paycheck and resources provided for me so I can do actual work over trying to add zeroes to my own bank account. Many scientists make this trade consciously.
I had a high up at Microsoft try to get me in trouble with my boss because I tried (appropriately) raising concerns that Azure was an near-impossible to target platform for OSS cloud software due to basic missing features. I had another thread with a higher up, with Russinovich on it, in which the principal manager lied repeatedly over, and over, and over about the entire shape of the VMSS API. They shipped anyway and have spent years adapting that API in the exact way I pointed out, and of course now have to support both. I had a team ask me not to ship a feature for (open source software you've all undoubtedly heard of) because they wanted me to use their Azure-proprietary flavor instead. I'm pretty sure that feature never even shipped because that team had designed it so poorly that it wasn't even suitable for tiny deployments.
Microsoft is excellent as using young, passionate folks, especially ones that don't have experience in advocating for themselves, and pretty terrible at promoting or rewarding individual contributors doing their best to push things forward. Oh and my total comp was garbage. I joined a startup and got a 40% bump without even asking.
Last large company I worked for had something along the lines of "improving state of the art at the company" as a performance metric for principal / staff engineers. Basically, if you weren't doing something novel or carving out some personal impact on the development process, tooling, or product itself, they always had something they could hold against you if they wanted.
The net result was, predictably, staff engineers went out of their way to leave feedback on PRs (typically worthless, often self-contradictory within short time spans) to keep their name visible, and any pain point raised and effort to resolve it by senior level developers was shot down because some staff engineer "was working on it".
Yeah. I don't know what "created" means. Was this person strongly advocating for the creation of Copilot, putting together business cases for why Copilot should be created, and fighting with corporate to get dedicated resources onto a Copilot team? Or did this person join as a software engineer and happened to be assigned to the Copilot team? There's a much stronger case for "deserving" (whatever that means in capitalism terms) greater compensation for the former than the latter.
This person is also trying to hire startup roles, so not exactly an unbiased viewpoint, either.
Man with ego invents, creates new jobs both at his company and outside, boosts the industry productivity. It's spark that matters; no matter how much wood you bring upfront, it won't burn until the first spark is created.
I once was in bed with a top lawyer making multiple hundred k a year, who was whining about his law firms partner taking half of the money he made with his work, without doing any work himself. He did not appreciate me asking why he didn't take up self employment if he could then just keep 100% of what he made if he was salty enough about his partner to complain about it to a stranger (me).
I believe those big bad companies and bosses DO bring quite a lot to the table, a stable income, resources, a life free of personal risks, maybe even just credibility and many other things... It's childish to gloss over this.
A lot of employees don’t understand what’s involved in being a business owner, building a Rolodex, the 100 nos for every yes, etc. So they think the owners (or partners) do nothing. But in reality, they’re getting paid for years of building relationships with clients, etc. There’s also what I call bathing in shit: having to work with people you detest, and having to do unethical things (which I still struggle a lot with)
Yes someone is going to bring up an edge case where someone lucked out by being born into the right family. But in most cases it’s just the hard work over time, with a mix of risk taking.
As something who’s spent years trying to build those relationships, I truly appreciate it.
> The VP who worked most against Copilot’s creation, would later tell me I didn’t deserve the promo. That person is now in charge of GitHub Copilot.
It's a tale as old as time at Microsoft where a VP (who usually has a fake job if we're being real) tries to actively block things they have no actual understanding of, it goes out and is a massive success, and then they take credit and build an empire around it.
Copilot will end up a worse product as a result of this dynamic. All you have to do is look at the anemic release of Copilot Chat, a preview of a product that people working on it should feel embarrassed about, to see how the shift has already happened. It's a shame, but it's how things work there.
There are some high-level execs at Microsoft who are great, and it's a true joy when you work with them. But in my experience, many are completely lost on what their product area is even about anymore, or so actively steeped in org-level politics that they've lost their sense of how to actually Get Shit Done.
+20k bonus, in addition to the years of steady above average salary for your area and great benefits (like full high quality healthcare for your entire family), etc.
Corporate jobs aren't a slot machine, they're a place to pay the bills without stressing about it every month.
It's a public company though, you can be an investor too. In fact you are probably given stock awards that over time would make you a ton of money in the long run.
When my friends started working at MS 15 years ago they were getting stock awards at a 20-40 dollar per share price... now those shares have gone up substantially in value (~10x in that time). It's not quit your job and never work again money, but it's definitely enough to afford a big down payment on a home.
Anyone who was Senior or higher at Microsoft 15 years ago, did’t sell their RSUs as soon as they vest, and are still there almost certainly made enough cumulatively to buy a house in cash, even in Seattle.
$20k bonus seems nice. Most folks acknowledge their salary and bonus opportunity from day one - what was the bonus potential here? Context helps.
I’d ask Alex: for your new startup, how will you quantify bonuses for salaried employees who do outstanding work or create services that are exceptionally valuable to avoid disappointment like your own?
His complaint doesn't include what level he was at MSFT. Depending on level he may have only been meeting expectations. It also doesn't include what his compensation was, just his additional compensation for working on co pilot. He could be 1 million TC + but we won't know.
A few other factors to consider:
The people doing the low level coding are usually not the top compensated people for a project. Its the higher level architects that determine the overall plan for the product and set the direction for mid and low level engineers.
Bonuses for above-and-beyond stuff (ie not the "bonuses" that everyone counts on) tend to vary wildly in my experience.
I've gotten a very similar bonus to this for putting in a few long nights and accelerating a client delivery by a month. And sometimes much less for much more effort.
I think it depends on how much of a slush fund a project has, which might not be at all tied to the impact of the project.
"As a dev lead of the github copilot team, I was responsible for creating the first prototype, designing the plan to productionize it, onboarded a team of engineers, blah blah..." Now pocket your 250k sign on bonus + 650k annual comp. Whining on public about a small bonus only trashes your reputation.
Seems like an age-old case of high volatility high rewards vs low volatility low rewards tradeoff, and mismatched expectations. Last time I worked at a FAANG I got a sticker for going above and beyond duty, and that was a great nudge to get out of that system if I wanted a better reward structure for my labor.
Was Copilot a largely riskless copycat effort because TabNine had previously proven the technology was feasible, TabNine had previously proven the business fit, and Copilot was backed by a gorilla of a company?
Technology-wise, I have a Deep TabNine beta invitation email dated August 2019 and Wikipedia tells me that Copilot announced June 2021.
Business-wise, Codata bought TabNine in December 2019.
Gorilla-wise, TabNine was initially one lone undergraduate at Waterloo.
Author's ego is too big to be a cog (extremely well compensated and risk-free cog) within a corporation, so we should all wish him the best of luck in creating his own AI startup and destroying the moat that Google itself admitted they don't have.
If I were somebody with a past including a multitude of public assault allegations along with formal charges, even if I were innocent, I would simply not start Twitter drama about my former employer who didn't fire me during an absolute PR nightmare and risk that coming up again. Just me, though.
only 20k? and vp that was against it now manages it....
ok, pretty sure we are missing the 'other' perspective of what was going on there.
lets face it, companies will pay a lot to keep those magicians. so something doesn't add up. why lose such a professional for a little sum of money?
so, there is another side to the story.
I see criticisms that all seem reasonable (as in, you can certainly disagree with them, but they are not baseless petty attacks), but I see very little (if any?) ad-hominem.
Nah is plain envy, professional envy, none of those "non baseless petty attacks" comes from people that can say they worked in the most disruptive tech of the new century.
Or he's a jerk. I don't know either way but there do seem to be at least two possibilities. A third is he's a jerk in real life and people are envious of some of his accomplishments. Hard to say, so I try to reserve judgement.
Lack of corporate regulation and labor organization have led to a real asymmetrical arrangement for workers. It's a classic power imbalance. CEO-to-worker pay is at its highest level in 100 years [1]. Seems to me senior corporate leadership and founders are basically full of it. If scientific discovery is subject to multiple discovery, leadership just can't be a unique skill and founding a company just can't be a unique occurrence [2]. I'm confident there are 1000s of qualified folks capable of outperforming senior leadership in any position at any fortune 500. I'm confident if it wasn't Tesla, it would've been another American electric car company 6 months later. Buuut do we pay CEOs or founders as though they're replaceable? They play golf with board members and send their kids to summer camp together. They're dilettantes, hucksters, shmucks, dorks. For example, I'm always amazed when this type holds an all hands to discuss company culture un-ironically. As though leadership principles or company values or whatever pseudo-religious structure they divined might actually take us in? How can you even respect yourself? I suppose the pragmatic, sociopathic voice in my head might justify it: "If they can see this as more than work, I can extract more from them. If they can see me as more than another person fumbling around in the dark, I can elevate myself above them." I just couldn't live with the constant lying to myself.
Always makes me chuckle when folks blather on about risk-reward premiums while relying on public infrastructure -- postal service, education, military, internet, rail system, roads, power grids, democracy, freeways, bridges, etc. Start or run your business in war torn Afghanistan and I'm happy to talk about 400:1 pay ratios between leadership and lowest paid employees. No? Alright then. Sit down, shut up, and just be happy folks aren't pulling out the pitchforks... yet.
